


and not a stone tell

by justira



Category: Final Fantasy IX
Genre: Epitaphs, Gen, Horror, Oeilvert, Temporary Character Death, Video Game Mechanics, Zidane-centric
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-31
Updated: 2019-10-31
Packaged: 2021-01-15 19:31:36
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,847
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21258485
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/justira/pseuds/justira
Summary: Zidane. You're not alone...—Zidane and his companions go to Oeilvert, and find more of themselves there than they were prepared for.





	and not a stone tell

**Author's Note:**

> A spooky story for Halloween. I always found Oeilvert rather disturbing.
> 
> Thanks to [seventymilestobabylon](https://archiveofourown.org/users/seventymilestobabylon/), [seventhe](https://archiveofourown.org/users/seventhe/), and [crazyjane](https://archiveofourown.org/users/crazyjane/profile)for the betas.
> 
> Title is from "[Ode on Solitude](https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/46561/ode-on-solitude)" by Alexander Pope:
> 
> _Thus let me live, unseen, unknown;_  
Thus unlamented let me die;  
Steal from the world, and not a stone  
Tell where I lie.

## and not a stone tell

* * *

  
  


Their shadows entered Oeilvert first. Zidane watched the black shapes stretch long and lonely before them in the dying light, reaching out to meet the dim hush inside. The doors closed just as they had opened, adamant and untouched, and the last lingering fingers of clean sunset light, tinged even redder by the canyon walls, slipped down the edges of their shadows in silence. Zidane thought he could feel that phantom touch, almost, the warmth slipping down his back and thinning until the dark swallowed it, just as it swallowed the hollow boom of the doors closing shut. The vibration rippled over his skin, low and quick and vaguely adrenaline-pleasant, thrumming through the quickening of his heart like a wakened beast, and, despite everything, Zidane felt the excitement pool in his belly. He could feel his tail puff, and he blinked away the dark to get a look at the place.

It was light in here after all, the unending sunset stumbling drunkenly through the vast crazed spiral of stained glass, hovering uneven and discoloured in the air before tripping over the surfaces it fell on. The gilded light made the air seem thick, or maybe something else did, maybe the way the place muted magic, but it took Zidane a moment to realize there was no dust kicked up by their entrance to dance in the dense light. It was just the still, silent column of light.

The place was pretty, Zidane realized— beautiful. He swallowed, a little dry, and it made him suddenly aware of the silence. No one had said anything yet. He suppressed the urge to clear his throat, then did it anyway, on purpose, good and loud. It startled everyone — Zidane included, if he were being honest, which was not a particular strong suit of his — and he folded an uneven grin into his words: "Any ideas on where to start?"

Amarant shot him a look Zidane could have sworn was dirty, even though the hair. Freya took a step forward; her feet and claws were silent on the stone, tail out for balance as she leaned around, trying to see into the dense shadows beyond the drunken light. "There are stairs," she said, quiet and all serious. Amarant had at least dignified his throat-clearing joke with a reaction. Steiner, Zidane was pretty sure, hadn't even realized Zidane was making fun of them. The two moogles huddled behind their party, not a peep or chitter out of them.

Oh well, whatever. "Stairs it is!" He gestured to the moogles. "You still want to explore, Stiltzkin?"

Stiltzkin and Mooel goggled around, Stiltzkin leaning to look at the dark doorways. "Kupo... Maybe we'll just stay here."

Zidane clapped his hands — it rang echoes all around — and rubbed them together. "All right. Let's get that stone and get out of here."

They started towards the back wall, where the stairs rose silhouetted against the tremendous stained-glass window, the lopsided spiral pattern casting odd green-gold dapples on all of them. Zidane watched one play along his skin, mesmerized for a moment by the way it fell like a soft secret on him. He grinned, and turned so the light fell on his tail, puffing it as much as he could to watch the light whisper across it, almost seeming to make it glow.

"Quit preening," Amarant muttered— from behind him, Zidane realized. They'd all stopped when he had. He turned from where he stood with one foot on the first step. The light fell across their faces in crazy patterns, and they almost seemed like strangers for a moment, anonymous and unknowable. But Steiner shifted in his armour, and the clank chased the moment away, sending echoes yapping in the shadowed corners. Standing as he was in the middle of the light, Zidane couldn't see into the dark that skulked along the edges of the room and gathered in every unentered doorway. Which, with them standing there like idiots, was currently all of them.

Zidane vented an explosive sigh. It disturbed the air of the room; he could feel it even if he couldn't see anything move in the air. He waved the others on, then turned the wave into a flourished bow on impulse. "Come, O maiden—maidens—fair and pure. Let I, your Knight, protect thy virtue in this place!"

Freya levelled him a look of deep unamusement. What? He'd even changed the quote to suit. It wasn't his fault he'd gone into theatre.

At least it got them moving; Amarant shouldered past him, radiating ire, Freya and Steiner following. The sound of their footsteps hushed across the chamber again; the echoes seemed to gather in the center of the room like the light, multiplying. Something felt off about that, and Zidane listened harder, trying to separate out the sounds: the constant chink of Steiner's armour (sigh), the soft pad of his own feet. The nearly soundless scrape of Freya's movements. Amarant even quieter beside her. And that was it. He should have been able to hear the wind outside, hurtling down the canyon as the day's heat rose from the ground in counterpoint with the sinking sun. The building should have been settling with age, the wind, the shifting temperature. Monsters, maybe, moving around— he was sure the place must have some. It felt—

It felt like they were all alone. It felt like they'd stepped into some separate space, and as they mounted the steps, the alone-feeling grew large and hollow in his chest: he couldn't see outside the window. The glass was thick and old, rippled and faceted and beautiful, and there was no world to see beyond it. He felt afloat in the glow, submerged in honeyed light, as if the surface world was far above, far outside, and he should kick... His hand lifted to touch the glass, hesitated.

"Zidane, come look." Freya's voice floated over the air with the odd distant half-clarity of a call over open oceans.

Zidane's hand froze before it reached the rippled glass; he shook his head, a breath tumbling into the hollow spaces inside him like coming up for air. He took a step away, and another, still staring at the window and what he couldn't see outside it. Then he forced himself to look away, back at his companions.

Everyone was gathered around some sort of device set into the floor. "It wouldn't respond to me," Freya said as he came up; Amarant emitted a grunt that Zidane took to mean he'd tried it too, with no luck. Zidane eyed the thing in the thick light. It looked... No, not familiar. That wasn't right. He poked it with his toe, and somehow the jingle of Steiner's nervous flinch didn't make him smile. Zidane huffed, and felt everyone go still as he reached out a hand to touch it.

Zidane blinked at the flash of blue light, dizzy for a moment— oh, he'd always looked for blue light...

But the light merely corsuscated along the sphere, unformed, alternating blue and red. It lapped across his skin like Trance-light, mixing with the light from the window, red and green pulsing beside each other, their intersections bright white-yellow veins, obscene and obscenely beautiful, that moved like water-patterns; blue light and oceans... Zidane fought down a discordant touch of nausea, an urge to brush his hand across his skin to wipe the light away.

"That's all very interesting," he said, lightly and loudly into the silence, "but it doesn't look like the Gulug Stone to me." He scanned the room for the density of shadow that meant a doorway: there. He pointed. "Let's try that room." To the right of the main doors as they'd come in; it had seemed like the smaller half of the building from the outside.

They picked their way down the stairs again; Zidane hesitated at the bottom, weirdly reluctant to step into the middle of the room, into the thick of that light. The stained light flooded the center of the room with the density of tepid treacle, and Zidane thought of how the canyon light had felt slipping down his back, gentle and cool, and how this light felt thick, like a pressing touch. The obdurate glow of it made it hard to see past it to the edges of the room — and it was odd, Zidane realized now, that the light _did_ have edges, falling in a solid crooked column through the window, as if it were being poured, as if the air here had some different density that made it trap the light, herd it away from the corners, shine only on what it was supposed to and keep the rest hidden.

There were, Zidane realized, no cobwebs in the corners.

No webs on corners or ceiling, no skeletons of small dead scuttling things, no carcasses of bugs or birds. Nothing lived here, that was for sure. But even if Zidane couldn't see the remains of snuffed-out lives, he could feel the age of the place impressing itself on they six that had entered, like time played by different rules here. It was impossible to live in this place, but Zidane got the strong, strong impression that many things had certainly _died_ here.

The electric pool of excitement spread from his belly to his fingers as he picked his way around the room; the slow transformation of wariness blooming under his skin, dripping out of his pores into an almost palpable film, making his entire body alert to the weight of the air. He could hear the faint noises his friends made, and that should have been comforting. Edging along the boundary between light and shadow, it was like their own little sunset — but that didn't sit right, the air too still without the day's dying gasp of wind sweeping the sun to its sleep. The shadow-spiral and lead lines quilting the floor reminded him of the lines on a palm, and he wondered if he could read the age of the place, its story, in them. His friends walked along that liminal line, and when he glanced back at them he had to suppress a flinch as Steiner stepped on the palm-patterns, uncaring. There was no reason to care about that.

It felt odd, hushed and... _particular_; as soon as he thought it Zidane had to shake off a feeling of familiarity and focus. That might be the magic barrier again, a little like standing too close to Vivi but with a not-thereness where Vivi was such a vibrant little presence.

But the heavy-still feeling crowded into his consciousness. Maybe something lived here after all, which would be fine, because they could fight it and move on and get out of here. But the nagging mix of presence and not-thereness set an itch between his shoulderblades. He remembered the innocent pull of excitement as he'd entered this place, belly-toes-and-fingertips; it felt like that but laid atop his skin instead of playing under it. The fine hairs on his nape rose as if brushed by the faintest exhalation, and Zidane suppressed a shiver — anticipation, or fear, or the intimate whisper of adrenaline. He tamped it slow, forcing it casual, so he could look at everyone else before entering the next room without startling them. The words were on his lips to ask if they felt it.

The question died unasked as he turned. He blinked at the sight of them, wary behind him, looking so— out of place. Bright living things, all of them, looking foreign in this timeless, time-caught place. Strangers. What a weird thought, when they were all strangers here. But their faces, half-gilded by the slanted light, half-shadowed, looking uneven and alien, told him the answer without his asking: They didn't feel it.

He cleared his throat again, annoyed that it wasn't on purpose this time. "Ready?" he asked, stupidly, on the threshold of the dark room beyond.

Amarant titled his head like this was indeed a stupid question. 

Zidane rolled his eyes. That was almost comforting, great.

He led the way into the next room, and he was fine just admitting it: the room was creepy. But it was honest about it. It bothered him less than the crazed beauty of the foyer; here, at least, things felt wrong right away. That was— better. Probably.

The room was layered with a faint, sourceless blue glow. Shadowed tiers of stone rose all around, faces and arms in wretched repose. The light was too steady to give the flickering illusion of movement, which just meant that Zidane had to blame something else for that impression. That was— less better.

"This place is not empty," Freya said from behind him.

"Too right," Zidane muttered. He could hear Freya's steps. He could hear Steiner, too, of course, but that clear high chinking jingle had a comforting note of not-belonging, a clearly foreign sound. Foreign to here, is what Zidane meant. Friend to him. And Amarant was as silent as ever.

But Freya's steps came with the faint unavoidable scritch of a Burmecian's claws, and that sounded too close to something that could find them here, out of the dark.

It was almost a relief when the thing crawled out of the shadows.

It came from the forest of stone faces. Zidane watched the grinding movement of the thing as it dragged the living stone of its squat body over the cracked floor, grasping its own engorged, scrivened belly.

It crawled before them, opened the doors of itself with a low stone sigh and—

Freya, it was _Freya_.

Zidare stared, frozen. They all did. He heard the shuffle of his Freya, the Freya at his side, taking a bewildered step back, the sharp, startled scrape of her claws— and that was wrong, because as the stranger-Freya, the strange-Freya, weird-Freya, weirding-Freya crept out, its claws clicked and dragged and scraped on the stone, as Freya's never should.

The stone statue huddled silently behind the not-Freya, having disgorged the uncanny thing. And the not-Freya moved like it had forgotten how, or never had the chance to try; breathed like it didn't have to but knew it should; looked at them with eyes that were so dead and so _desperate_.

"I am Freya!" it rasped, Freya's low throaty voice rendered arid, lifeless, the name resounding off the silent stone, whispering it back at them, a desolate chorus of forlorn _Freyas_—

He didn't see it, or didn't understand, it happened too fast and felt like forever, because it happened quick as a gasp, and Freya was dead.

Maybe the thing had moved, slither-quick, or maybe all it had done was meet her eyes and try to take away her existence with its words, as if in one pitiful proclamation it could claim that for itself, could claim to be real, as if it breathed and felt and ached as they did because Freya was _dead_, mirror-shattered by her own reflection.

"_Shit_," Zidane spat. "Steiner, Amarant!"

They were moving already, Steiner fumbling for the precious phoenix down to get her breathing again, Amarant tapping chakras, and Zidane _hissed_ and slit the damn thing's throat.

It bled red; that startled him.

And then he killed the silent stone thing, too.

He spun around, tripping over the crumbled stone, the not-Freya's dissolving corpse, and he didn't have time to feel sick at how its face was losing definition, forgetting its brief, ugly life already. Zidane skidded to his knees beside Freya's—no, not corpse—he skidded beside Freya and snatched the fragile tuft of phoenix down from where Steiner had tipped it out of its tiny bottle and into his palm; he popped the buzzing burn of it into his mouth, panicked and careful, clapped his hand around Freya's nose, sealed his mouth over hers, and _breathed_.

The warm magic tingle of the down left his mouth, and he watched its glimmer speed down her throat into her lungs, the glow silhouetting her ribs as if she had embers inside her before Zidane had to throw his hand up in front of his face at the final flaming glare of it, and then Freya was hacking up golden ashes. She convulsed, curled up on her side, breath weak, quick, shallow; shocky shivers crawling over her and her eyes rolled-back white, and that ate its way up Zidane's spine because _dead eyes dead eyes dead eyes_. She couldn't swallow a potion like this. "We have to get her to the moogles," he said, low and urgent.

Amarant jerked a nod, already heaving her up onto his back, tying her hands together with his belt, and they jogged through the darkness, Steiner and Zidane keeping guard as Amarant puffed between them. Zidane could hear himself panting. _Freya, Freya, Freya_, his heart thundered in his ears. _fRejaaa.. freYaA, FReya... Freya..._ the shadows whispered up his spine, learning the name, tasting it, stuttering it out in cold rushes against the frantic hot pumping of his blood, _I am Freya_. Zidane shut out the dusty mumble, and ran.

He expected a fight. He expected _something_; he expected the shadows to condense into hands, faces, maws. He expected more things to crawl out of the dark and disgorge doppelgangers. He expected the cold glint of his weapons to turn into the cold glint of eyes. He would be ready this time, and all the place did was whisper a name up his nape, setting his fur on end.

The moogles were spooked, watching them stumble out of the dark, and Zidane was hissing "Tent tent tent!" at them through the gloaming. They set to it immediately, small paws working to throw up one of the magical healing tents that only worked under moogle hands. The bones of it rose in uneven shudders, the soft glitter of magics sparking, like an animal shaking itself awake in the sun, and Zidane thought sickly of Freya's ribcage, stuttering unevenly and glowing from within, and Amarant swung inside the open flap just as the thing humped itself upright. Zidane scrambled in after him, and he swallowed at the sweet, cumbrous air inside. Other times he'd used a moogle tent, it had felt like the comfortable, warm weight of a blanket, but right now it felt cloying, heavy in his panting mouth. Zidane undid Freya's wrists, and Amarant slid her carefully off his back and down onto the bedroll Mooel scooted inside and under her just in time. She looked— fragile. It looked wrong on her, strong Freya, smart Freya, quick Freya.

Mooel fluttered anxiously around her. Zidane blinked at the displacement of the air by his wings, the ponderous stirring caused by even that small tremble of membranes, reminding him too much of the thick air outside. The moogle squeaked, "She had the phoenix down?"

"Yes!" Zidane said.

"But not a potion-po?"

"_Yes_," Zidane snapped.

"Kupo!" the moggle chirped with an affronted fluffing of his ruff. Amarant stirred, but said nothing.

"Sorry," Zidane bit out, then swallowed over that and said, slower, "Sorry."

"I understand," Mooel said. He put a paw against the damp fur of Freya's forehead.

Zidane crossed his arms, tapped his foot. Stared around at the patched-together magicked hides of the tent. Dead things, they were, spells clinging to them in death long after the vibrant spark of their hosts had been extinguished, enchanted into place by the moogles' particular magic. He'd never thought about the tents before; they had just been things, convenient moogle magic that worked when he needed it to. Even here, even when living magics guttered out unbirthed.

"She will be all right, I think," the moogle stated at last.

Zidane's breath punched out of him. "Good," he said. He repeated it, "Good," then felt like an idiot. Repeating things didn't make them more true, any more than the whispered _Freyas_ made the not-Freya real.

"It would be best if you let the magic work on her," Mooel prompted. And they should leave, they should, let her breathe in all the magicked air herself.

"Right," Zidane said, stilted and stupid. He turned to go. Amarant gave the moogle a long, silent look, then followed Zidane out of the tent. Zidane felt the tent's protections slide over his skin and pop like a bubble as he exited, the sigh of the magics closing up behind him, a gentle wound. "You," Zidane pointed at Steiner. "Rusty. You stay here with her."

For once, Steiner didn't argue. "I will," he said. There was a long pause. Zidane stared out at the dark, silent. "I've lost soldiers," Steiner offered, at length.

"She's my friend," Zidane snapped. "Not my soldier." _And she's not lost._

"She's a soldier," Steiner insisted. "A Burmecian knight. She worked hard for that."

Zidane shrugged the rebuke off his shoulders, refused to let it settle there. "She's my friend," he repeated, insisting on the present tense.

"She is very brave."

_Shut up_, Zidane thought at him. "I know," he said. He stared back out at the gloaming. "We have to go back out there." The gilded light still lumbered through the window. Shouldn't the sun have set by now?

Stiltzkin toddled up to him and tugged on his pants. The moogle's paws let off a soft scrabbling sound, sending something unpleasant crawling along Zidane's nape. He had to focus back on the moogle's piping voice to hear him say, "Maybe this would help." Stiltzkin held out a potion bottle, the powerful stuff, and an aerosol of ether. And an emerald, of all things.

Zidane almost snapped at him, too, but reined in his temper so he could say, more evenly, "Give the potion to Freya. We can't use the rest here." This place was really getting to him.

He roused himself enough to flip Stiltzkin some gil; the coins glittered too much as they arced through the golden light. Stiltzkin caught them handily and fluttered off inside the tent.

Zidane turned back to face the giant room again. "Come on," he said to Amarant. "Let's get this over with."

They inched away from the camp, Zidane glancing back at it too much, and all around, into the shadows, too quick and too twitchy, but he had to do something to appease the itch all up his back, the way the hair rose on his arms, on his tail. The camp vanished too quickly behind them, the meagre glow of the tent swallowed by the great spill of light, its density indistinguishable from the strange solidity of the gilded column, a gasp of company and warmth gulped back down without sound or sustenance. They made it to another doorway, and into the room beyond, and even the illusion of some sliver of safety was lost, shadows and stone separating Zidane and Amarant from their companions. The shadows gathered more densely here, veiling every corner, but a wash of light ebbed from the center of the room, doing more to blind them to the dark than to illuminate the room, sprouting mysteries in the margins.

Zidane wanted nothing to do with it, and gestured for Amarant to follow him in skirting around the bright depression when the thing flashed to life.

Zidane flinched as the giant orb flickered into sight— then was arrested as the letters bloomed into being atop it. They seemed to crawl before him, burrowing into his brain, down his spine and back up his throat: "Mother— Terra—" He shook his head, scrunched his eyes shut. Then opened them again, quickly, before anything else bloomed behind his eyelids.

"You can read that?" Amrant rumbled beside him.

"Yes," Zidane gritted, tearing his eyes away from the letters again, and realizing he could make no sense of them, their foreign shapes. But they burned like staring at the sun too long, blinking and seeing inverses everywhere, black voids instead of light. "No!"

Amarant crossed his arms, silent.

"No," Zidane said, with more control. "It's like they're— talking to me."

Amarant stared at him from under the scarlet shadows of his hair. "I can't read it," he said. "And this isn't the Gulug Stone."

"Right," Zidane said. "Right!" He shook himself, literally, trying to dislodge the touch of the light, the whisper of the letters. That left only the shadows to retreat to, and he almost welcomed that, edging along the uneven twilight— Zidane almost got lost in the crazed patterns of the floor, tricked into playing the old children's game of not stepping on cracks just to avoid thinking about the letters— but Amarant strode up beside him, wary but unbent, and Zidane tried to concentrate on his companion instead. But he kept getting distracted by the red riot of Amarant's hair looking like a spill of blood, and thinking of how the not-Freya had bled red.

He didn't even see the thing scuttle out of the shadows, only registering its low stone groan in time to see the mimicker of Amarant stagger out and Amarant slitting its throat before it could speak.

Amarant shook his claw blades free of blood, frowning. Zidane was panting in belated panic. Amarant looked back at him. "Focus," was all he said.

_So it's not just Freya_, was all Zidane could think.

When they found the high bridge arcing through the hollow glowing belly of the place, Zidane couldn't decide if the open air licking over his skin in the bloated space was a good thing or not — at least none of the stone things could hide here. But the place pulsated slowly, like blue, blue breath. Zidane had always looked for blue light, and this was a mockery of that dream, the blue lancing behind his eyelids. He led Amarant through the chambers, at an undignified trot, wanting away from how the place turned his head inside out, how it put words in his head and splayed his secrets out in the light. The place pressed airships upon him, and he batted away the images, staticky fizzles. It tried to tell him histories, and he could guess the words, like they were coming up from inside him, stories he could spin if he could remember them, remember how, remember a blue light that swallowed self... _No, no no_. This wasn't it either. "This isn't it," he said out loud. "We've turned on everything here. Let's go back."

Amarant grunted agreement.

Zidane's mind turned back to the thought of their pitiful little camp, that little blot of warmth waiting for them somewhere past the secrets of this place, warmth and truth and friends. Freya, breathing the magic-drenched air. What Zidane wouldn't give for Garnet's healing hands now. But Garnet was herself burdened, and Zidane wanted to seed smiles on her face, not place more weight on her shoulders. He wouldn't tell her of this place, he decided. He would not tell her how it sent a fester in his soul, how it whispered and mocked. He would get the Stone, and get out of here, and get Garnet out of Kuja's clutches, and he would tell her stories, true stories of good things, stories as true as he said...

He saw the stone thing crawling, this time. When it disgorged its doppelganger, Zidane watched it with a sick fascination. Garnet stood there, and Zidane's eyes couldn't help trailing to the too-even rise and fall of the thing's chest, the way it held itself in a mockery of Garnet's hesitant surety. He could never imagine this thing walking as a woman, the light sway of hips and hair. The slight crouch of battle-readiness seemed the only natural thing about it, the only thing that wasn't a lie: how easily it could fall into the habit of murder. And it chilled him, that this thing might have it right, that it had stolen the central, truest grain of identity, the terrified will to survive at any cost. Death lay in its gaze, in its intent; it could not see a beautiful thing but want to possess it, to have it so none other could. Stealing faces and crying out its crime.

But then the not-Garnet met his eye and he— he blinked, uncertain, at the pain and desperation he thought he saw there, in the eyes like the eyes he wanted to gaze into and understand, and he didn't know—he couldn't tell—if the thing had stolen that sharp-edged sadness from his memories, from Garnet's grief, from the things Zidane imagined into her in his dreams— or if was _true_, if _that_ was the only thing about these monsters that wasn't a lie. If there was something real and hurting there, something seeking so hard that it would steal to survive — and who the hell was Zidane to condemn orphaned thieves, what could he say when he had stood outside the windows of those who _had_, who _owned_— what could he blame someone for looking for— He thought of Vivi. He thought of a dumb kid with a monkey tail, looking all over for a blue light over the ocean. He thought of the way this place, Oeilvert, seemed to touch him, seemed so empty. _Are you the ghosts of this place? Can nothing live here without taking another thing's life for itself?_ He thought of voices raspy with disuse, calling out a cry of being and belonging.

He stood a moment staring at the thing, frozen, as if it were his own double pinning him with its gaze. Then the not-Garnet spoke, "I am Garnet," and all of Zidane's hesitance vanished.

_Garnet can't speak right now. You are a lie_.

He killed the thing before Amarant could.

Zidane was panting, the blood of the not-Garnet hot on his face. Why was it hot? It should be as cold as the stone it came from.

Amarant walked up beside him, having disposed of the stone progenitor. Zidane was staring at the doppelganger's dissolving face, melting away as if Garnet was crying, losing her city, losing Dagger, losing herself...

Zidane jumped when Amarant touched his elbow, and almost hissed, startling away to stare at his companion. Amarant was not the touching sort, and was regarding him evenly as Zidane gathered his breath, as if Zidane were a wary wild animal. "This door has unlocked," Amarant said at length. He pointed at the now-cracked doorway.

Zidane balled up his breath and stuffed it down his throat, willing it to fill his lungs, spread in his blood, wash away the acid ache of adrenaline. "All right. Let's check it out."

That breath punched out out of him when he saw the forest of broken faces. They pushed out of their orifices, empty eyes and empty expressions. They spoke, and Zidane put his hands to his ears, and it was no good, because this time Amarant said, "I can hear them. They're speaking inside our minds." Zidane laughed a bitter laugh: someone trapped in this hell with him. But Amarant took in their mad mutters silently, calmly, and Zidane stared at him, upright and unbothered as the faces fell silent. Zidane felt like the place plucked at some sort of strings in his mind, made of gut like on a harp, dried gut stretched tight, vibrating at some fine-tuned frequency.

Fine. It was just him. It was just him, and the place was driving him crazy.

He jerked his head for Amarant to follow him away from the faces, the round blank mask-like things. They were like a caricature of a Qu's flat features, and some part of Zidane knew he shouldn't have thought of Quina, because when the stone thing scuttled before them and vomited up a mockery of Quina's form, Zidane wasn't even surprised. Its cry of "I Quina!" died with an obscene gurgle in its grinning mouth.

Zidane stood over it, his breath surprisingly even. "Back to the camp," he said.

He realized, later, that he had been avoiding thinking of Vivi. He realized it when he saw the thing.

Too close, it was too close, a mockery all the more heartbreaking for its faithfulness.

It stumbled, clumsy, unsure in its own skin, its face a mystery.

"I'm Vivi," it said, and Zidane's heart broke, and his control with it.

Later, he crouched outside the tent, staring at the not-empty not-darkness. Freya was awake; Steiner and Amarant had stayed inside with her. Zidane had looked at her shaky, hesitant movements, and seen over and over the stumbling way the not-Freya had moved, and he had had to go outside again. He stared out into the twilight of the cavernous, gulping ceilings, where shadows stretched between splashes of blood-gold and crazy green-blue spatters. The mingled light and dark seemed to roil before him, roiled in his mind, the nauseating licks of hot and cold mixing on his skin, the buzz of the place, snatches of half-heard conversations lapping at his ears in tongues he half-knew, or had half-forgotten.

He kept seeing the thing, the thing that wasn't Vivi, its pathetic corpse, again and again. He might have cried; he was too angry to care. Vivi, working so hard at _living_, at claiming a self he could call his own, that he could call _him_, Vivi. This place—

This place had no right to crawl into Zidane's head, into Zidane's heart, and take that away from Vivi, to make a mockery of an existence so fragile and fleeting and _so gods be damned REAL_.

_I'm Vivi_, it had said, and Zidane had wanted to laugh, or cry.

He had gone cold, then.

He had always run hot, quick and bright and angry, but in this place, in Oeilvert, in the shadows that crawled along his skin, he became as still and silent and cold as the stone.

He stared out into the shadows, with the small sounds of the camp, the meager warmth, washing up against his back. He glared out at it, this place that fed on his thoughts, that took every precious thing he wanted to think of and remember and ate it up and vomited it out and made him murder them. _Fine_, he thought. He would have to do this alone. Take care of them alone.

_Me_.

_Me, you bastards_.

And when they set out again at a cautious crawl and the stone thing scuttled from the shadows, and Zidane looked at it, _me me me I am alone you bastards_—

Out came the thing, and it looked like him.

"I am Zidane!" it whispered-screamed, a ragged cry piercing him to the marrow— but he was already moving, and he slashed its throat, and it bled its cry on him, it bled dust and ages on him, dry and cold, cold, cold, and it was dead.

He stood panting.

And as they approached the depths of the place, as they wrested the Gulug Stone from its guardian, as they made their wary weary way back out, the things came and came again.

And he killed them all. His face on all of them, and he was alone alone alone.

  
  


* * *

  
  


**Author's Note:**

> I started this story about a decade ago, then went through a long fallow period. I picked it up and dusted it off and rewrote and finished the whole thing over the course of two weeks in October with the goal of posting something spooky for Halloween. It ended up being a good exercise in editing my own work and writing to a deadline.
> 
> I love Final Fantasy IX and its particular brand of candy-coated horror, where it starts off looking cute but turns out to be dire-leaning-eldritch underneath. I wanted to write something that followed that sort of trajectory, and I really wanted to dig into how creepy Oeilvert and the Epitaph enemies are, and I hope I conveyed that. I also always like taking video game mechanics and trying to make them work in narrative, so I had a lot of fun with that here.
> 
> I also very much wanted to call forward to the fantastic sequence over which "You're Not Alone" plays, with Zidane trying to go on without his friends, and how the idea of "you're not alone" can be comforting or really scary. I recommend watching and listening to this version of the song to go with this story, which is a multimedia fanwork in its own right:
> 
> **  
[Final Fantasy IX - You're not Alone【Music Remade】ft. Dave Wallace](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vAXnzCUcmrw)  
**


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